About Dustin Marx

JavaFX Coming Soon to an Android or iOS Device Near You?

There has been big news recently in the world of JavaFX regarding many more components of JavaFX being open sourced as advertised at JavaOne 2012. In February Open Source Update, Richard Bair compiled a table of JavaFX projects that have been open sourced as of that post’s writing (Monday, 11 February 2013). As exciting as all that open sourcing is, there was something even more exciting highlighted below the table: ‘We’re also going to open source our iOS and Android implementations over the next couple months.’ Bair adds some timing and background information to this significant announcement:

The first bits and pieces for iOS should be out next week, with the rest of iOS and Android coming out at about the same time as the rest of prism (there is some timing dependency there). Both our ports are based on an as-yet unreleased version of JavaSE Embedded for iOS/Android.

After expressing the expected caveat ‘I’m not a lawyer’, Bair also addresses licensing issues on iOS and points out that ‘both OpenJFX and OpenJDK are both licensed with the same GPLv2 with Classpath Extension.’ He further describes his understanding of the licensing situation: ‘this means that if you take OpenJFX + OpenJDK (minus any binary stubs released under a different license), then you can safely combine this with your application and release your application under your own license as a single application co-bundle.’ I am sure we’ll hear more about the licensing details in the future as this develops.

Being able to develop Android and iOS applications with JavaFX will likely be a game-changer for JavaFX. I echo Bair’s concluding sentence: ‘I am looking forward to seeing what you all will do with this contribution, and hope to be running many Java apps on my phone / iPad in the near future.’ I look forward to using (and maybe even writing) some JavaFX-based apps on my Droid! I am presenting on JavaFX at Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG) Training Days 2013 tomorrow, so the timing of this announcement couldn’t have been better.

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